Pandorabots Frequently Asked Questions

This FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list is a work in progress - if you have any comments or suggestions for questions to include, please send e-mail to info@pandorabots.com with the word "FAQ" somewhere in the subject line.

A. Support

A.1 How does Pandorabots provide support?

Pandorabots offers two classes of service: free and premium.

The free server is located at www.pandorabots.com, and support occurs primarily through community efforts at forum.pandorabots.com (comming soon).

Premium support occurs with Pandorabots staff directly and is available through a variety of plans.

Sign up for Pandorabots Premium service to get premium Pandorabots support and to help us make Pandorabots even better. By becoming a premium member, you will receive our direct and immediate attention. You will also gain access to additional Pandorabot services that will extend and improve your pandorabot's capabilities, beyond those currently available on the free server. Contact sales@pandorabots.com for more information.

There is a lively and growing community of botmasters using
Pandorabots. If you have a question or want to open up a general
discussion you can post to the
Pandorabots forum .

For more general AIML questions not related directly to the Pandorabots service you should visit the
A.L.I.C.E and AIML Forum.

D.3. Can I create my own IM gateway?

Pandorabots has an API called XML-RPC for connecting third-party software to our bot hosting service. If you have programming skills, you can write your own software to
connect your bot to IM services. See section H.2 for specific information.

custid - an ID to track the conversation with a particular customer. This variable is optional. If you don't send a value Pandorabots will return a custid attribute value in the <result> element of the returned XML. Use this in subsequent POST's to continue a conversation.

The <input> and <that> elements are named after the corresponding AIML elements for bot input and last response. If there is an error, status will be non-zero and there will be a human readable <message> element included describing the error. For example:

Using the XML-RPC API described above, you can create a Flash component which collects user input and displays your Pandorabot's response. This component can be served directly from your own site. To do this requires programming the Flash control to make the appropriate HTTP request to the Pandorabots server and parse the XML response.

Jamie Durrant has written a very nice tutorial showing exactly how to do this: